Events of the Carnival of Freedom were launched on Tuesday morning in Nablus city in the northern West Bank.

The carnival was organized by Nablus governorate in cooperation with governmental institutions in order to mark the 50th anniversary of the Naksa, in which the remaining land of historical Palestine along with the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and the Syrian Golan Heights were occupied by Israel.

The organizers said that the events aimed at urging Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims to take action in order to regain the Palestinian right in their land and to send a message to Israeli occupation authorities that resistance will continue until the liberation of Palestine.

Scores of Palestinian school students participated in a human chain from the east of the city to al-Shuhada Square in Nablus downtown.

The participants also hoisted the Palestinian flag while sirens were blown for a minute.

“Hamas rejects all attempts to erase the rights of the refugees, including the attempts to settle them outside Palestine and the so-called alternative homeland. Compensation to the Palestinian refugees for the harm they have suffered as a consequence of banishing them and occupying their land is an indisputable right that goes hand in hand with their right to return. They are to receive compensation upon their return and this does not negate or diminish their right to return,” this was a quote from article 13 of Hamas’s Document of General Principles and Policies launched by the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, in May 2017.

This document, which included all positions, principles and general political lines adopted by the Movement since its formation, emphasizes that Palestine’s borders are from the Jordan River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. And from Ras Al-Naqoura in the north to Umm Al Rashrash in the south, as an integral territorial unit: the land of the Palestinian people and their homeland.

The document added, “The expulsion and banishment of the Palestinian people from their land and the establishment of the Zionist entity therein do not annul the right of the Palestinian people to their entire land and do not entrench any rights therein for the benefit of the expansionist Zionist entity.”

Refugees department

Hamas has established a special department for refugees in 2001, under the leadership of the Movement, as a specialized department for Palestinian refugees wherever they are.

Since its formation, the Department has endeavored to preserve the historical, political, economic and cultural rights of the Palestinian refugees, to raise awareness among the Palestinian people about their cause, to improve their situation and to support and coordinate local, regional and international efforts to protect their rights and compensation and to contribute to realizing the conditions that enable them to return to their cities and villages.

According to Dr. Essam Edwan, the head of the refugees department, “The department seeks to develop the institutional work of refugees in line with the comprehensive project of liberation, and to strengthen the steadfastness of refugees in places of refuge so as to enable them to uphold their rights and constants.”

Edwan pointed out in a statement to the PIC that the Department contributes to the activation of the cause of refugees, mobilizing them in their places of refuge, in order to qualify them to play a leading role in the liberation and return projects.

It also seeks to develop a unified national Palestinian position that preserves the rights of refugees, as well as to improve the level of media discourse and cultural and artistic works to serve the refugees’ issue.

Edwan stressed his Movement's keenness to bring about positive change at the Arab, Islamic and international levels in favor of the refugees’ issue.

Constant positions

On more than one occasion, the leaders of the Hamas Movement, headed by Ismail Haneyya, who recently became the head of the political bureau of Hamas, reiterated their absolute rejection of the alternative homeland project, or giving any concessions by his Movement on the refugees’ issue.

Hamas’s Document of General Principles and Policies, summarized this issue by saying, “The right of the Palestinian refugees and the displaced to return to their homes from which they were banished or were banned from returning to – whether in the lands occupied in 1948 or in 1967 (that is the whole of Palestine), is a natural right, both individual and collective. This right is confirmed by all divine laws as well as by the basic principles of human rights and international law. It is an inalienable right and cannot be dispensed with by any party, whether Palestinian, Arab or international.”

It is noteworthy that most of the leaders of the Hamas Movement are refugees, especially the head of the political bureau Ismail Haneyya, who hails from the village of Jura in the 1948 occupied city of Ashkelon, and who is still living in a refugee camp to the west of Gaza city.

Strategic aspirations

Writer and political analyst Ali Huwaidi stressed that Hamas has viewed the issue of return and refugees with strategic aspirations, based on what is stated in its newly released document, which assured that the Palestinian issue is essentially an issue of an occupied land and a forcibly-displaced people.

Huwaidi clarified that the Hamas document has worked on setting the foundations and roots of the right of return, through its adherence to the principle of resistance as a strategic option to liberate Palestine, achieve return, and build a full sovereign state with Jerusalem as its capital.

Huwaidi stressed that “In line with this sense, the Hamas Movement, 30 years after its formation, and after 69 years since the Nakba of Palestine, has maintained its national principles and strategic vision for the issue of refugees and displaced persons, and their right of return to their homes in Occupied Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and not to any other place, conditioning this return in its historic document to liberation, the thing that the vast majority of the Palestinian people believe in.”

International Protection to Stop the Ongoing Nakba is Long Overdue – BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights

The Nakba is ongoing, not only through policies of ongoing displacement implemented through the Zionist-Israeli strategy which seeks to control the maximum amount of land with the minimum number of Palestinians on that land, but also through the failure of the international community and Arab states to uphold their obligations, the continued internal fragmentation, the disenfranchisement of the PLO, and the weak performance of the Palestinian Authority which is dictated by the restrictive Oslo Accords.

On this the 69th commemoration of the Nakba and the 100th commemoration of the Balfour Declaration, the Palestinian people face the most challenging political environment to date.

It is imperative to reassess and revise the current approaches to the Palestinian Question: the humanitarian aid and politically based approaches adopted by the international community based on the massive imbalance of power and void of any human rights foundations, resulting in what is known as the ‘peace process’ and the Oslo Accords, have failed to achieve justice and peace. Instead, these approaches have more deeply entrenched the Ongoing Nakba and facilitate Israel’s colonial domination and apartheid policies.

These abysmal circumstances have resulted in the continued denial of the collective and individual rights of the Palestinian people, as dictated by UNGA resolution 194 of 1948 and UNSC resolution 237 of 1967, for the return of the Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons to their places of origin and Palestinian self-determination.

The resounding silence and lack of practical action by the international community in response to the Palestinian prisoners’ demands for dignified treatment; including access to health care, education, lawyers, families’ visits and tools of communication which constitute the most basic human rights is profound.

The lack of international response to the mass hunger strike of over 1000 Palestinian political prisoners who are in need of immediate intervention and protection symbolizes the dehumanization and demonization of the Palestinian people in their struggle for dignity, justice and freedom.

Likewise, the unchallenged ongoing primary, secondary and multiple forced displacement of the Palestinian people, whether in Mandatory Palestine or in the Shatat (exile), defies all norms, standards and best practices of international humanitarian and human rights law.

Accompanied by the absence of both international protection and less than the bare minimum of humanitarian aid and assistance, displaced Palestinians remain the largest and most marginalized forcibly displaced group in the world.

Today, 66 percent of the approximately 13 million Palestinians have experienced displacement at least once in their lifetime, with significant numbers experiencing it more than once.

The blatant disregard of the international community to uphold their responsibilities and obligations, coupled by the absence of adherence to dozens of international treaties, conventions and United Nations resolutions, allows not only the numbers of Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons to continue to grow unabated, but subjects them to formal discrimination.

Meanwhile, the secondary displacement of Palestinian refugees in the Shatat (exile) is becoming a regular phenomenon: those who have previously resided in Arab countries like Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and other host/refuge countries, have been forced to flee due to the lack of protection and/or to escape armed and violent conflict.

Many second or third refuge countries have in one way or another fallen consistently and remarkably short of providing the requisite international protection to Palestinian refugees seeking asylum in their countries. Rather than considering their vulnerability as recognized refugees and ensuring equal treatment and assistance to Palestinian refugees, many countries have implemented discriminatory procedures and policies that have been extremely ineffective and detrimental, resulting in widespread and systematic violations of the most fundamental provisions of international refugee law.

While some countries closed their borders in the face of Palestinian refugees in violation of the well-established customary rule of non-refoulement, other countries have excluded them from schemes designed to provide asylum and protection to Syrian, Iraqi or Yemeni refugees who fled under the same circumstances. According to UNRWA, almost 280,000 Palestinian refugees are internally displaced inside Syria, and an estimated 43,000 are trapped in inaccessible locations.

Estimates show that in searching for safety and security over 120,000 Palestinian refugees have fled Middle East countries, mainly from Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon to Europe, Australia and Americas within the last five years.

International complacency vis-à-vis the rights of the Palestinian people can be traced back 100 years, when powerful states formalized the colonization of Palestine through the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the Mandate for Palestine in 1922 in favor of the Zionist movement.

Today these same states continue to confer impunity upon Israel rather than end violations and international crimes perpetrated against the Palestinian people. Instead of addressing the realities of Israeli practices and policies highlighted in the report of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) regarding “Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid”, the UN, under political pressure, withdrew the report. The withdrawal of the ESCWA’s report is an act that allows Israel to continue on the path of Apartheid and its non-compliance with international law.

On this the 69th commemoration of the Nakba, the Global Palestinian Refugee and IDP Network (GPRN) reiterates its previous recommendations (see Nakba statement 2015) and calls for:

The international community to take all measures within international law to hold Israel accountable for its ongoing strategy resulting in ongoing human rights violations and international crimes committed against the Palestinian People, including forcible transfer, colonization and apartheid;

States and UN Agencies, particularly the United Nations Relief and Woks Agency (UNRWA) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to uphold and fulfill their obligations and responsibilities to provide humanitarian aid and assistance as well as protection to the Palestinian People, and to end the discriminatory exclusion of Palestinians from the international and/or national protection system/s;

The Palestinian leadership to clearly announce the failure of Oslo and all its annexes and put in place a national strategy that maintains the rights and dignity of the Palestinian People; including to organize comprehensive public elections for the Palestinian National Council (PNC), with the inclusion of the Palestinian People, especially those in the Shatat (exile);

The adoption of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign to achieve justice and durable peace for the Palestinian People, including the right to reparations (repatriation/return, property restitution and compensation) as a core component of the right of self-determination.

Between 750,000 and one million Palestinians were forced out of their homes in the years leading up to 1948, fleeing the unrest caused by Zionist militias that had come to Mandate Palestine to set up a Jewish state.

The Nakba, or Catastrophe, created what has now become the world’s longest lasting refugee crisis with camps being set up in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria to home expelled Palestinians.

Though they were due to be temporary structures, the camps became permanent and still stand today. As families expand, the camps have become overpopulated.

On 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the executive head of the World Zionist Organisation, declared the establishment of the State of Israel. Israelis mark the event as their “Independence Day”. Ever since, 15 May has been remembered internationally as Nakba Day.

Nakba Day commemorates the forced displacement of more than half the Palestinian population; 750,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes and into refugee camps. The catastrophe later became the longest running refugee crises in the modern era.

The day is also marked in Palestinian communities across the world in remembrance of the brutal end to three decades of struggle for Palestinian self-determination in historic Palestine. Their right to self-rule was denied first by the British and then quashed by a new Israeli state. Subscribing to the Zionist ideology, the Israeli state, with exclusive claims to the land for the Jewish people, was ideologically opposed to accommodating the vast majority of the inhabitants of Palestine.

In addition to the many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that were forced into exile, over 600 Palestinian villages and towns were razed to the ground, in an effort to ensure Palestinians never returned to their homes.

What Happened Next?

Nearly a million Palestinians had been displaced. Some were subjected to misery under a military rule in the new State of Israel. They were prevented from returning to their homes, even when military rule was lifted 20 years later, and continued to face extreme discrimination.

The vast majority were forced into Gaza, the West Bank and the neighbouring Arab countries. They lived in tents for years at the mercy of the international community. The UN mobilised humanitarian relief for the Palestinian refugees, setting up United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in the process. It passed Resolution 194 which called on Israel to permit Palestinians to return to their homes and to compensate the hundreds of thousands of refugees for their losses. Israel has failed to do either.

Seventy years on from the Nakba, Palestinians seem to move from one cycle of oppression to another. They remain stateless and the vast majority continue to suffer under a brutal Israeli occupation.

The BDS National Committee (BNC) Commemorates the 69th Anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba.

It is possible…It is possible at least sometimes…It is possible especially nowTo ride a horseInside a prison cellAnd run away…It is possible for prison wallsTo disappear.For the cell to become a distant landWithout frontiers – Mahmoud Darwish

May 15, 2017 marks the 69th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. Between 1947 and 1949, Zionist paramilitaries, and subsequently Israeli forces, made 750,000[PDF] to one million indigenous Palestinians into refugees to establish a Jewish-majority state in Palestine.

The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) calls on people of conscience the world over to further intensify BDS campaigns to end academic, cultural, sports, military and economic links of complicity with Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid.

This is the most effective means of standing with the Palestinian people in pursuing our inherent and UN-stipulated rights, and nonviolently resisting the ongoing, intensifying Nakba.

The Israeli regime today is ruthlessly pursuing the one constant strategy of its settler-colonial project —the simultaneous pillage and colonization of as much Palestinian land as possible and the gradual ethnic cleansing of as many Palestinians as practical without evoking international sanctions.Following in the footsteps of all previous Israeli governments, the current far-right government, the most openly racist in Israel’s history, is heeding the words of the Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky who wrote[PDF] in 1923:

Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. […] Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.

Sixty-nine years after the systematic, premeditated uprooting and dispossession of most of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs from the land of Palestine at the hands of Zionist gangs and later the state of Israel, the Nakba is not over. Israel is intent on building its “iron wall” in Palestinian minds, not just our lands, through its sprawling illegal settlements and concrete walls in the occupied Palestinian territory, its genocidal siege of over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza, its denial of the Palestinian refugee’s right to return, its racist laws and policies against Palestinians inside Israel, and its escalating, violent ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley and the Naqab [PDF] (Negev). It is sparing no brutality in its relentless, desperate attempts to sear into our consciousness the futility of resistance and the vainness of hope.

The present mass hunger strike by over one thousand Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and the grassroots support that it has triggered give us hope.The growing support for BDS among international trade unions, including the most recent adoption by the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO) — representing over 910,000 workers — of an “international economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel” to achieve comprehensive Palestinian rights, gives us hope.

The BDS movement has succeeded in sharply raising the price of corporate complicity in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. It has compelled companies of the size of Orange and Veolia to end their complicity and pushed global giant G4S to begin exiting the Israeli market. Churches, city councils and thousands around the world have pledged to boycott Hewlett Packard (HP) for its deep complicity in Israel’s occupation and apartheid. This gives us and many human rights campaigns around the world great hope.

The Barcelona municipality’s decision to end complicity with Israel’s occupation, coming on the heels of tens of local councils in the Spanish state declaring themselves “Israeli apartheid free zones,” give us hope.

The spread of remarkably effective BDS campaigns from South Africa to South Korea, from Egypt to Chile, and from the UK to the US gives us real hope.

The growing intersectional coalitions that are emerging in many countries, organically re-connecting the struggle for Palestinian rights with the diverse international struggles for racial, economic, gender, climate and indigenous justice give us unlimited hope.

In 1968, twenty years after the Nakba but unrelated to it, Dr. Martin Luther King said, “There can be no justice without peace and there can be no peace without justice.” For seven decades, and against all odds, Palestinians have continued to assert our inalienable right to self-determination and to genuine peace, which can only stem from freedom, justice and equality.

But, to reach that just peace, we realize that we must nourish our hope for a dignified life with our boundless commitment to resist injustice, resist apathy and, crucially, resist their “iron walls” of despair.

In this context, the Palestinian-led, global BDS movement with its impressive growth and unquestionable impact is today an indispensable component of our popular resistance and the most promising form of international solidarity with our struggle for rights.

No iron wall of theirs can suppress or overshadow the rising sun of our emancipation.

The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society. It leads and supports the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Visit www.bdsmovement.net and follow @BDSmovement.

Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) quelled on Monday a peaceful march that kicked off on Monday in Bethlehem city to mark the 69th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe or the usurpation of Palestine).

The PIC reporter said that IOF soldiers quelled the march at the northern entrance of the city and showered participants with tear gas grenades.

Dozens of Palestinians suffered suffocation due to Israeli intensive shooting of tear gas canisters, he added.